An eviction, another squatting!

We would like to express our support to the squatting actions in Calle Almagro de Nou Barris (Barcelona), in Hotel Madrid, and many other squatting projects related to both public and private spaces- either in or out the context of M15 movement-,. It is an excelent deep work of antithesis to property and creation of free spaces.

From our point of view, this shall be a far-reaching task in order to systematically get spaces back from capital (private properties) and from the state (capitalized public properties), and lead them at the community's disposal. It is a matter of starting a process in which neighbourhoods shall self-manage these spaces for their use and enjoyment. Furthemore, these squatting actions shall only have a real changing power if they are kept beyond the fringes of capital, both private and state -with its subsidy policies- initiatives. Not being wished these spaces to turn into a joint management of misery in capitalism, it shall be necessary to exclude them from any plans of economic profitability, of management in hands of a few people, and of the state's social control.
This shall mean a quantum leap in the wide squatting movement. Squatting shall move forward into more significant projects in which the community not only squats and manages spaces, but also offers people tools to fight. We believe that rehousing people who have been evicted, as it is being done in Nou Barris and will be at Hotel Madrid, is a good start whereas it allows the community to empower itself and assume the ability of managing in common the housing problem in our society. Besides, it allows to bring up a straight clash against banks and real state agencies which speculate and make a profit of the basic need of a house, as well as a clash against the capitalist system of life management.

This step forward in the general squatting process shall also help to extend the phenomenon of squatting, and make it accesible, visible and understandable to everyone. Moreover, squatting shall become a feasable and possible alternative, specially in the present economic context in which the possibilities to get a house are more and more restricted, as well as the refusal to carry on a free life. That is why we believe these taken and liberated spaces shall not tend to become, once again, in new social centers or alternative leisure locations, but they shall become self-managed centers where people can develop free and politically aware experiences which make squatting the beginning of a general self-management of life. Therefore, we believe it would be interesting to get into four basic aspects of squatting in which is based the Hotel Madrid project:

1. Rehousing people.
2. Creating centers of legal and practic information for future squatting actions (Squatting Offices).
3. Creating spaces where people can learn in a non-authoritarian or hierarchical manner, free from any sectarian dogma or will and beyond the fringe of utilitarian reason.
4. Freeing up public spaces against the capitalist and state logic.

Furthermore, we find really important to squat and collectivize rural areas, lands, deserted villages, orchards and vegetable gardens, in order to help people to access them against the emptiness, speculation and renunciation. This would also be applicable to squares, parks, lots and urban waste grounds.

Finally, we would like to mention we believe squatting shall extend as far and soon as possible to any social, politic and economic sectors, i.e. factories, companies, workplaces, schools, and universities, among others, in order to being managed by the community from the inside. That way, it will be us who decide on any aspects of life that affect us by only paying attention to the real needs of people: what would we like to destroy, what to keep, what to transform. To do this we find necessary to dissociate every free space of the mercantilist logic, the tyranny of money, the wage-earning jobs, and of any kind of domination; all of this will only come together with our capacity of generating experience, our persistence and resistance. We will only be free when we dare to be.

An eviction, another squatting!

"A social movement that forgets its prisoners is doomed to failure".